Alexander Wang Talks Fur Hammocks, Takes Us on a Tour of His First-Ever Store

His Soho flagship opens to the public tomorrow, but Alexander Wang walked us through it this morning, from the hammock made of fox fur to the cage (yes, cage) draped with baby's breath. We predict a run on Brendas, starting immediately.

Congratulations on your store.

Thank you!

How long has this been in the works — how long have you been planning this?

Factually? [laughs] Probably my entire life. No, only within the last year, year-and-a-half. In terms of this location specifically, we were planning on opening, and were almost about to take another space, and then this location came up — the opportunity to take it — and we took it, so we kind of reconfigured everything and customized it to this space. And we've just been rushing and rushing and the pieces of the puzzle fell into place about an hour ago [laughs].

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Well, it looks very finished. How did you come up for the ideas for the design touches, like the cage and the hammock?

Starting with the foundation, it's such a beautiful space already. Just playing with the natural characteristics of the architecture, starting with the columns and the windows. We wanted to start with a really clean focus, something monolithic, start with the stone…warming it up with the touches of antique brass, so it doesn't feel too sterile and too cold, but still gives it that kind of clean gallery feeling. And bring in a little bit of the irony and sexuality into it, so it kind of takes the formality out of that. So with the cage, it really does capture a moment, where people can come in and see our special collaborations, or exclusives that we did for the store, things we want to highlight. Then when you enter the space, it's kind of a "living room" area with the fur hammock. You know, we have a lot of fur-covered furniture pieces in our showroom, with goat hair. So to bring in that irony of a fox fur hammock, it's got that kind of opulence in it, that's kind of crazy, but that I love.
And the tufted [leather] lawn chair. Which is just, you know, the things that I always kind of like — very common things but taken out of context.

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You mentioned exclusives for the store. Can you talk about what those might be, coming up?

The first thing is that we have the jewelry from our collaboration from our show with Betony Vernon that we showed on Saturday. Then we have a lot of accessories, shoes, handbags that we've done in special colorways and fabrications that will be exclusive.

I saw the whole wall back there.

And then this rack right here, we did exclusively just for the opening, which is five key styles. They're all done in black leather. Jackets, peacoats, vests, things like that we've done exclusively for the store opening. Style-wise, too.

You're doing an event at London Fashion Week. Do you have anything else coming up as well?

No, the two big things this season were the store opening party that we did last night, which was crazy and amazing, with Lauryn Hill. I just died and went to heaven. And the London fashion party that we're going to do. I will be in Milan and in Paris, but I'll just be relaxing and doing —